Product description

Written by cancer physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee, "The Emperor of All Maladies" is a stunning combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms our understanding of cancer and much of the world around us. Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a novelist's richness of detail, a historian's range, and a biographer's passion.
The story of cancer is one of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out "war against cancer." It's a story of science and scientists, of centuries of discoveries, of setbacks and victories and deaths, told through the eyes of Mukherjee's predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.
From the Persian Queen Atossa, who instructed her Greek slave to cut off her malignant breast, to the radical surgeries of the nineteenth century, to the first recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy, to Mukherjee's own leukemia patient, Carla, "The Emperor of All Maladies" is a story of people and their families who soldier through toxic, bruising, and draining regimens to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.
Riveting and magisterial, "The Emperor of All Maladies" provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia."

Author information

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. He has been published in such journals as the "New England Journal of Medicine," "Neuron," and the "Journal of Clinical Investigation."
Stephen Hoye has won more than a dozen "AudioFile" Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards, including one for "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert T. Kiyosaki. He has recorded many other notable titles, such as "Every Second Counts" by Lance Armstrong and "The Google Story" by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.

Review quote

"Two-time Audie Award winner Stephen Hoye does a great job of conveying all of the nuances of the narrative.... This highly accessible and quality audio production will greatly satisfy audiences liking titles that similarly attempt to humanize otherwise clinical topics, such as Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus, Mary Roach's Stiff, and Atul Gawande's Complications." ---Library Journal Starred Audio Review